Different Flavours of Planet Commandline //at 22:40 //by abe

Since there were quite some requests for a Planet Commandline feed without the microblogging feeds included, I splitted Planet Commandline into different flavours. I’m quite happy with that solution, because I must admit that the amount of microblogging postings in relation to normal blog postings was indeed higher than initially expected

So from now on Planet Commandline has a basic flavour at http://planet-commandline.org/ and one with the microblogging feeds (climagic and commandlinefu) included at http://planet-commandline.org/+snippets/.

For making this possible I hacked our Planet Venus wrapper to accept arbitary configuration snippets to be added at the end of the configuration as well as as sed-based modifications to the concatenated configuration before Planet Venus is run on them.

This also allowed me to create further flavours of Planet Commandline:

• +german where Beat Gätzi’s German-written Chrütertee blog has been moved to, and
• +emacs which adds Mickey Petersen’s Mastering Emacs to the list of included blogs.

I hope nobody minds this diversification of Planet Commandline.

Currently no combination of flavours is supported, but if there’s a relevant demand for the one or the other combination of flavours I may have a look if that can be automated, too.

Planet Commandline officially online //at 22:25 //by abe

Around the first bunch of postings in my Useful but Unknown Unix Tools, Tobias Klauser of inotail and Symlink fame came up with the idea of making a Planet (i.e. a blog aggregator) of all the comandline blogs and blog categories out there.

A first Planet Venus running prototype based on the template and style sheets of Planet Symlink was quickly up and running.

I just couldn’t decide if I should use an amber or phosphor green style for this new planet. Marius Rieder finally had the right idea to solve this dilemma: Offer both, an amber and a phosphor green style. Christian Herzog pointed me to the right piece of code at A List Apart. So here is it, available in you favourite screen colors:

Planet Commandline

For a beginning, the following feeds are included:

• Myon’s Unix blog category
• Evgeni Golov’s Desktop in a Shell column
• My Useful but Unknown Unix Tools column
• My Shell blog category
• The GRML Development Blog
• Chrütertee (Swiss-German)
• Commandline Magic’s identi.ca feed

Which leads us to the discussion what kind of feeds should be included in Planet Commandline.

Of course, all blogs or blog categories which (nearly) solely post neat tips and tricks about the command line in English are welcome.

Microblogging feeds containing (only) small but useful command line tips are welcome, too, if they neither permanently contain dozens of posts per day nor have a low signal-to-noise ratio. Unfortunately most identi.ca groups do, so they’re not suitable for such a planet.

What I’m though unsure about are non-English feeds. Yes, there’s one in already, but I noticed this only after including Beat’s Chrütertee and his FreeBSD command line tips are really good. So if it doesn’t go overboard, I think it’s ok. If there are too many non-English feeds, I’ll probably split Planet Commandline off into at least three Planets: One with all feeds, one with English only and one with all non-English feeds or maybe even one feed per language. But for now that’s still a long way off.

Another thing I’m unsure about are more propgram specific blogs like the impressive Mastering Emacs blog “about mastering the world’s best text editor”. *g* (Yeah, I didn’t include that one yet. But as soon someone shows me the vi-equivalent of that blog, I’ll include both. Anyone thinks, spf13’s vim category is up to that?)

Oh, and sure, any shell-specific (zsh, tcsh, bash, mksh, busybox) tips & tricks blogs don’t count as program-specific blogs like some $EDITOR, $BROWSER, or $VCS specific blogs do. :-)

Of course I’m happy about further suggestions for feeds to include in Planet Commandline. Just remember that the feed should provide (at least nearly) exclusively command line tips, tricks or howtos. Suggestions for links to other commandline related planets are welcome, too.

Mutationen auf Planet Symlink //at 18:41 //by abe

Manche mögen es schon bemerkt haben — es gab in den letzten Monaten ein paar neue Blogs auf Planet Symlink. In chronologischer Reihenfolge (wozu git doch gut ist :-):

• Stacksmashing von Thomas “nezza-_-” Roth
• Das Ubuntu-Blog von Roman “yoda” Hanhart
• Seegras’ Logbook
• Manuel “mkr” Krummenachers Blog
• Lukas “lmb” Blatters CammaBlog
• Beat “Flupp” Rubischons Fotistudio

Auch habe ich ein paar Blogs entfernt. Die Blogs auf folgenden Domains existieren nicht mehr: frozenbrain.com, qolume.ch, meinblog.ch und sunflyer.ch.

Und nachdem schon seit längerem immer wieder Beschwerden kommen über nicht auf den Planet passende Inhalte aus ein und demselben Feed, und heute wieder eine solche kam, habe ich mich ausserdem auch durchringen können, dkgs Feed in der Planet-Konfiguration auszukommentieren.